The Biographies of Rechungpa: The Evolution of a Tibetan ...

The biographies 41
The hare year in the colophon must be 1531, when Götsang Repa was 61-years old
and the Karmapa was 24, if Götsang Repa had passed away by the next hare year, 1543,
which was also a year after the eighth Karmapa’s death.
Götsang Repa had a new edition carved of the previously printed blocks of his record
of oral instructions. Presumably this was his 123 folio text on the Cakrasamvara
instructions, the colophon of which sadly gives no information upon the date of its
composition. 171 He composed ancillary texts for that work, and a supplication to
accompany his biography of Rechungpa. He states that this adds up to 432 blocks. Both
sides of a folio would have been on each block for The Life of Rechungpa itself, in the
Rechung Puk edition, numbers 248 folios.
Götsang Repa states that he had blocks made for the biography of Tsangnyön Heruka
that had been previously carved (bzheng) at Dakpo Gyal (Dags-po-rgyal). The 146 folio
text (as in the present Rechung Puk edition), together with a supplication, is said to
amount to a 170 blocks. In addition to those, there are another forty works, making a total
of 775 woodblocks.
His Tsangnyön biography was therefore an earlier work than the Rechungpa
biography. Gene Smith, in his preface to the biography of Tsangnyön, writes that ‘the
colophon states that the biography was written in 1547’. 172 However, the colophon of the
biography reads spre’u’i lo hor zla dang po’i yar tshes bcwo lnga la grub par sbyar ba’o:
‘I completed this on the fifteenth day of the lunar month of the monkey year.’ 173 This
could not be 1547 as that was mostly a sheep year with its first few months being in the
horse year, and it seems that Götsang Repa was already dead by that year. Instead, the
date of Götsang Repa’s biography of Tsangnyön could be 1512, 1524 or 1536, as no
element is specified, and as it must be after Tsangnyön’s death and before 1543.
The final page of the Rechung Puk edition contains a drawing of Götsang Repa, who
is portrayed wearing bone adornments and earrings, his hair in a topknot, seated on a
deerskin, and having the attributes of a bow and set of arrows.
Lhatsun Rinchen Namgyal, in his biography of Tsangnyön, lists Götsang Repa, along
with himself, as being amongst Tsangnyön’s thirty-five principal pupils, who are all
described as ‘realised’ (rtogs-ldan). This term is also used as an euphemism for a nonmonastic
master of tantric practice, although Rinchen Namgyal himself was a monk.
Götsang Repa wrote a short autobiography in verse. E.Gene Smith has an incomplete
transcription (the first two folios) amongst his personal notes. 174 This portion,
unfortunately, goes only as far as his twelfth year. He describes receiving a number of
teachings during that year, including the corpus of Tsalpa Kagyu (Tshal-pa bKa’-brgyud)
and Shangpa Kagyu (Shangs-pa bKa’-brgyud) teachings, from his paternal uncle. He
states that during that time, in his eighth year:
A tea-merchant that had been to Lhasa said, ‘There was a yogin, who
wore a human skin, named Tsangnyön,’ and as soon as I heard that my
body-hair stood up and tears came to my eyes. 175
Unfortunately, he is as vague in giving the year of his birth as he is in dating the
composition of his texts, merely stating that he was born in a tiger year. 176 Tsangnyön
was in his early twenties when he first wore human skin and became known as
Tsangnyön. According to Lhatsun Rinchen Namgyal, Tsangnyön was in Lhasa, wearing